When it comes to investing, going with the crowd will rarely if ever make you rich. If your objective is to buy low and sell high, then, in the words of Warren Buffett, you must be “greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy.” This is the foundation of contrarian investing.
But there’s a twist. To be a contrarian investor, you must first know what to be contrary to. And this is where the SEC’s invaluable EDGAR database comes in. Every quarter companies and large institutional investors are required to disclose their equity holdings. By patching these together, we can get a fuller picture of a particular stock’s popularity.
What follows, in turn, is a look at the principal owners of Bank of America Corp (NYSE:BAC)‘s outstanding common stock.
As you can see in the following chart, the majority of B of A’s nearly 11 billion shares are held by institutional investors. Company insiders, including board members and corporate executives, own a further 0.06% of the outstanding common stock. And the public at large owns the remaining 40%.
Source: S&P’s Capital IQ.
Institutional investors
Digging in a big further, the largest institutional stake holders in B of A are asset managers. Bond giant BlackRock, Inc.(NYSE:BLK) tops the list at 4.9% ownership, followed by The Vanguard Group at 4.3%, and the asset management arms of State Street Corporation (NYSE:STT), Citigroup Inc. (NYSE:C), and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) at 4.2%, 2.1%, and 1.8%, respectively.
Source: S&P’s Capital IQ.
The largest buyers have been Citigroup and Fidelity investments, which have recently acquired 226 million and 66 million shares of common stock, respectively. Meanwhile, the two largest sellers of late have been Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (NYSE:GS) and Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS), which have disposed of 54 million and 22 million shares, respectively.
Biggest insiders
Turning to inside investors, far and away the largest inside owner is Thomas Montag, B of A’s co-chief operating officer, who received the equivalent of more than 1.5 million shares as a part of B of A’s Merrill Lynch acquisition. The second largest holder is board member Charles Gifford with 796,283 shares — Gifford was the chairman and chief executive officer at FleetBoston Financial before B of A acquired it 2004. And it’s not until you get to the fifth place that current CEO Brian Moynihan appears with an equivalent of nearly half a million shares.
Source: S&P’s Capital IQ.
The Foolish bottom line
While insider and institutional ownership together represent only one metric, it’s nevertheless an important one. Beyond hinting at the overall market’s sentiment toward a stock, it also gives investors insight into the confidence of the people best positioned to predict a company’s current state and future success.
The article Who Owns Bank of America? originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by John Maxfield.
John Maxfield owns shares of Bank of America. The Motley Fool recommends BlackRock. The Motley Fool owns shares of Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase.
Copyright © 1995 – 2013 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
